Korn’s Jonathan Davis: ‘We’re Not a Metal Band’

Korn have never exactly been the kind of band that tries to please critics — or, for that matter, anyone else but themselves — so when their tenth studio album, ‘The Path of Totality,’ was greeted with wildly mixed reactions last December, it was pretty much par for the course, albeit with one crucial difference: the new record, which finds the band experimenting with dubstep and electronic textures to a greater degree, was seen by some as a betrayal of their metal roots. As you might expect, the members of Korn see things differently.

“There’s a lot of similarities there, there really is,” said vocalist Jonathan Davis, talking to Radio Metal about the band’s efforts to blend dubstep and metal. “Dubstep music is really heavy. Some of those sounds were just so heavy that we thought it would work, so we wanted to experiment.”

Of course, he admits, “It was tough. We had no clue about what we were doing. That was something that hadn’t been done before. It was a big huge learning curve … Of course it was a hard record to make, but it was the funnest record I’ve ever made.”

As for the fans and critics who thought the band missed the mark with the album, Davis said, “There’s a lot of closed-minded metal purists that would hate something because it’s not true to metal or whatever, but Korn has never been a metal band, dude. We’re not a metal band.” He continued, “We’ve always been looked as as what they called the nu-metal thing. But we’ve always been the black sheep and we never fitted into that kind of thing so … We’re always ever evolving, and we always piss fans off and we’re gaining other fans and it is how it is.”

According to Davis, fans can continue to expect collaborations and genre-mashing from Korn in the future. “I want to mix everything together. I love all types of music and that’s why we constantly evolve, and we constantly keep doing different things. That’s why we like to do what we do.

“As long as it makes us happy. We don’t get bored,” concluded Davis. “So, I mean that’s art and we’re artists.”